As the healthcare industry has moved from paper to electronic records for the past decade, hospitals have continuously had to meet increased federal regulations related to the use of electronic health records. With the increased digitizing of health records, new challenges are being presented by duplicate medical records, language barriers, and disparate systems. Research shows that 7 to 10 percent of patients are misidentified when a record is accessed, and 6 percent of those patients can suffer medical harm or identity theft because of it.

There have been numerous efforts, or at least discussions, to get hospital physicians and staff to better communicate via text messages and away from widely used but somewhat antiquated pagers. But so far, it’s largely been problematic because people would use their own devices, potentially opening themselves and their hospitals up to HIPAA violations.

Beaufort (S.C.) Memorial Hospital has mostly changed over to a secure texting app, formally inserting into its workflow what providers were already doing with their devices.